RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thirteen months after a Tunisian street-vendor immolated himself and sparked the revolutions in the Middle East dubbed the “Arab Spring,” the bipartisan celebrations that attended those events last year appear premature, if not delusional. Now that Islamist parties are consolidating their power in the wake of the regime changes in those countries, President Obama’s claim that Egyptians merely wanted “a government that is fair and just and responsive,” or Senator John McCain’s assertions that Libyans were aiming for “lasting peace, dignity, and justice,” or Senator Joseph Lieberman’s article in Foreign Affairs that summarized the Arab Spring as a struggle for “democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world” each reflects dangerous wishful thinking rather than sober analysis.

This delusional enthusiasm of a year ago has not been chastened by subsequent events that have led to Islamist dominance across the region. That’s because the Arab Spring revolutions seemingly confirm a powerful narrative that for a decade has purported to explain the roots of jihadist terror, and the means for eliminating it. In his second inaugural speech, President Bush formalized this narrative in the Bush Doctrine, which articulated a foreign policy focused on ending the “resentment and tyranny” that left people vulnerable “to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder,” leading to terrorist violence that can “cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.” Only the “force of human freedom” can “break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant.” When the uprisings of early 2011 removed brutal autocrats like Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Tunisia’s Zin El Abidine ben Ali, the power of democratic freedom seemingly unleashed by our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan now appeared poised to work its magic in the heartland of the Islamic world.

A year later the dictators are gone and elections have been held, but this optimism about the power of democratic voting now appears simplistic and naive. The liberal democracies some expected to develop in the Middle East appear to be no closer to reality than they did under the tyrants. In Tunisia, an Islamist party, Ennahda, took 90 out of 217 seats on the new National Constituent Assembly. Like most Islamist parties, Ennahda takes it inspiration from Egypt’s Muslim Brothers, whose credo is “God is our objective; the Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” Exploiting the naïveté of Westerners who believe in the oxymoron “moderate Islamist,” Ennahda founder Rachid Gannouchi has assured the West and Tunisian secularists that his party is moderate and does not intend to subordinate their rights and freedoms to shari’a law. Yet Ennahda counts as supporters the more radical Salafists who do want strict adherence to shari’a, and who find broad support among the poorer, more conservative rural Tunisians.

http://melaniephillips.com/into-the-jungle-with…a-blancmange

Republicans! Are you leaders or lemmings? Is there really no-one in the whole damn country who has what it takes to lead the free world away from disaster – and persuade the American public to follow ?

What is the one question the successful Republican candidate for the US Presidency has to answer?

It is whether this person will beat Barack Obama.

What is the one thing that, squinting at the US political scene from a long way away, I have learned from the Iowa caucus?

It is that, unless a large light-bulb goes on somewhere in the Republican cerebellum pretty damn quick, President Obama will win a second term.

The Republicans are split between culture warriors, Cameroon crawlers and crazies. The culture warriors are deemed to be way too scary and will put off the only folk who matter, the floating voters. The crazies are, well, crazy. The received wisdom is that the only candidate who can win against Obama must be a Cameroon Crawler because he inhabits the safe and very unscary centre ground.

http://news.yahoo.com/explosions-shiite-areas-baghdad-kill-27-095726653.html

notice how all these jihadists are now called “insurgents”….rsk

BAGHDAD (AP) — A wave of explosions struck two Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 27 people and intensifying fears that insurgents are stepping up attacks after the U.S. troop withdrawal that was completed last month.

The attacks began with the explosion of a bomb attached to a motorcycle near a bus stop where day laborers gather to look for work in the Sadr city neighborhood. One of those who witnessed the attack said it filled the area with thick black smoke.

“People have real fears that the cycle of violence might be revived in this country,” said Tariq Annad, a 52-year-old government employee who lives nearby.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/01/04/five-things-we-learned-from-iowa/?singlepage=true
Five Things We Learned from Iowa

1. Negative campaigning works. Let’s see if we can spot a pattern here. Rick Perry rose up to take a lead over Mitt Romney, only to get smeared by a nasty piece of Washington Post work about a rock in West Texas. Herman Cain rose up to take a lead over Mitt Romney, only to get pasted with accusations of sexual misconduct. Newt Gingrich rose up to take a lead over Mitt Romney, but got hammered after the world learned about his work as a “historian” for Freddie Mac. And in Iowa, Romney-allied super PACs pounded Gingrich with millions of dollars of negative ads, pushing him into a poll free fall from which he did not recover in time to do well in Iowa. Meanwhile, candidates who until very recently never posed a threat to Romney never got much scrutiny. There’s no Scooby Doo mystery here. Romney’s core team are veterans of national campaigns and experienced at Beltway knife fights. Negative campaigning works, and the most effective negative campaigning is the kind that leaves no fingerprints. Let’s hope they intend to be even more aggressive against Obama than they have been so far in the primary. The media won’t help them out the way it has in going after Republicans.

2. The rules of campaigning have changed. In the past you needed money, manpower and message to compete, prety much in equal terms. Without all of those three you weren’t a serious candidate. That began to change with Mike Huckabee’s Iowa win in 2008, and the change has been completed now. Message is now magnified, money is secondary and manpower is in third. The 13 debates plus YouTube and social media plus the multi-layered 24/7 news cycle have all ripped up the old rules. You still have to have a ground game, you still have to raise money and you still have to have a message, but you also have to account for the new reality. It’s easier for candidates to forage off earned media and go viral, obtaining coverage across the networks and blogs and social media that would cost millions of dollars if you had to buy it. This may mean that the mainstream media is actually more powerful than it was in years past, despite the fact that its overall reputation has declined.

3. We’re pretty shallow after all. All the governor’s horses and all the governor’s men could not put things back together again, once Gov. Perry uttered the “heartless” remark. We’re petty and shallow when it comes to politics. We want someone who looks good, speaks smoothly and woos our psyches. Or, we want to be able to tell ourselves that we have become a part of something revolutionary. This isn’t really new, people have always sought after the shiny new thing, but it is magnified now in the age of incessant image bombardment and status. Candidates’ actual records in office mean a whole lot less than how a candidate makes us feel. Advantage: Obama.

4. Iowa’s worshiped “undecideds” are probably just low information voters. Take a look at the piece I wrote on undecideds yesterday. During our conversation one of the two men, Scott, ripped the Tea Party for refusing to negotiate with Obama. He also criticized Obama for failing to lead, but didn’t make the connection that it’s Obama’s leadership style and his conscious tactics that lead to things like the near-miss government shutdown and now, the recess appointment of Richard Cordray to the government’s new consumer protection racket. Obama is provoking the right to give himself something to run against, to create a media narrative that casts him as the reasonable adult. Scott struck me as very intelligent but not that well informed, knowledgeable enough based on mainstream media reports, but that knowledge is only about an inch deep.

Iowa chose Obama in 2008, with undecideds breaking for him late. How’s that working out?

5. About 75% of the Republican Party still doesn’t want to nominate Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney has pieced together a formidable machine capable of tearing down any candidate in his way. He has been running for president since the day after his last bid ended. But he still cannot muscle his way to better than 25% of the vote in the first caucus. He almost lost to a former senator whose last race ended in a pounding defeat. Romney’s weakness is also Gingrich’s weakness: Neither seem to be reliable men of their word. Rick Santorum is that, and that’s one reason he caught fire over the past few days. Rick Perry is that too, and now that he is staying in, he has a chance to make his case anew in South Carolina. But see point 3 and adjust tactics and messaging accordingly.

And with that, I’m not going to quote Davy Crockett, but I am going to Texas.

The Politics of Projection in the West Posted By Dennis Mitzner

To many on the political left, Europe’s new right-wing parties seem to represent the perils of Europe’s dark history. The rise of new right parties in Europe during the past decade led to widespread panic among many Western observers.

When European right-wing parties gain in polls and win elections, newspapers overflow with articles declaring the end of democracy. Following the Swedish parliamentary elections in September 2010, Newsweek‘s Denis MacShane wrote [1] :

Thus the arrival of a new politics in Europe. A decade ago extremist politics was confined to fringes and street protests. It has now arrived as a parliamentary force and is beginning to change how other parties behave and speak.

According to [2] Daniel Sandström, the editor of the large Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan, Jimmy Åkesson, the leader of Swedish Democrats, “is a clever populist, careful not to cross the line and say anything that seems undemocratic. But his party has a tremendous acceptance of racism.”

New York Times columnist, Roger Cohen claimed [2] that “hatred of Muslims in Europe and the United States is a growing political industry. It’s odious, dangerous and racist.”

Holder to testify on Fast and Furious before Issa’s committee [FOX] Jihadist Group Declares War on France for Being ‘Hostile to Islam’ [THE BLAZE] Review urges delay in borrowing billions for bullet train [LAT] Grover Norquist, Mullah’s Ally From an ex-CIA spy: U.S. must exploit new split in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard [CSM] President defies Congress […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11165/pub_detail.asp Egyptian archeological records from the 9th century BC show that King Saul established a Jewish Monarchy in the land of Israel. Famine ravaged the Kingdom causing Jacob, his twelve sons, and their families, to settle in Egypt. They became the twelve tribes of Jacob. Descendants became slaves, until Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. The […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11159/pub_detail.asp

THE MSM AND THE LIBERACI ROUNDLY CONDEMNED ISRAEL AND LIBELED GENERAL ARIEL SHARON. HE WENT TO COURT AND WON HIS CASE AGAINST TIME MAGAZINE….THE LEBANON WAS AND THAT EVENT AND THE ENSUING CANARDS MARKED A SHARP TURNING POINT IN THE MEDIA’S TREATMENT OF ISRAEL….RSK

This past September marked the twenty-ninth anniversary of the assassination of Lebanon’s president-elect Bashir Gemayel. Like its most recent clone, the 2005 murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, memories of the 1982 crime continue to haunt many Lebanese, some of whom are still persuaded its perpetrators to have been Syrian operatives bent on scuttling end-of-conflict prospects for Lebanon. Today, as Syria’s “Alawite era” teeters on the edge of its twilight, and as the international community prepares to indict it for ongoing crimes against its own people, the regime’s shady gruesome past is coming back to assail its tattered present days.

Although few Westerners today might remember Bashir Gemayel (or his assassination), and fewer still might be tempted to consider the motivations of those who commissioned his murder, rare are those who would not readily recall the massacres at Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, and rarer still are those who would not attribute those crimes to “right-wing” Lebanese-Christian militiamen—ostensibly bent on avenging their fallen leader. Never mind that Gemayel’s elimination and the ensuing massacres of Palestinian civilians hardly served the cause of Lebanon’s Christians. Indeed, the events in question plunged Lebanon into another eight years of bloodshed, tightened Syria’s grip over the country, turned it into a Syrian “satellite state” wholly bound to the whims and will of Damascus, and reduced the status of Lebanon’s Christians to a state of subservience and political insignificance. Yet, the narrative that attributes Gemayel’s killing to Israeli agents, and the Sabra and Shatila massacres to Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies—getting Syria off scot free—still has its defenders, and still defines a significant chapter in Lebanon’s modern history.

Today, as Syria veers toward civil war, as its military occupation of Lebanon seems to be a thing of the past, and as the international “Special Tribunal for Lebanon” readies to finger Syrian officials (beginning with the recent indictment of their Hezbollah foot-soldiers) for a string of political assassinations that have shook Lebanon since 2005, a revision of the pleasing narrative of an Israeli and (a “right-wing”)Lebanese Christian involvement in Sabra and Shatila seems fitting.

Besides the Kahan Commission’s mention of armed elements dressed in Lebanese Forces uniforms entering Sabra and Shatila between September 16 and the morning of September 18, 1982, there is no hard usable evidence to support the scenario of murderous Lebanese Christians itching to mete out revenge on Palestinian refugees for the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel; that is to say there is no concrete usable evidence besides eyewitness reports of “men dressed in LF uniforms”—knowing full well that “uniforms” of every stripe were a dime a dozen in civil-war-era Lebanon.

Of course a scenario such as this remains tempting, and in the context of Lebanon’s war—and its cycles of tit-for-tat massacres and counter massacres—it would have made plenty of sense for Christian militias to exact revenge on Palestinians for the killing of their leader. However, there is no evidence to bear this out beyond the circumstantial. Of course, an argument could be made—and indeed one was made—that rogue elements of the Lebanese Forces, without knowledge or express directives from the LF’s leadership, entered the camps with the intent of killing Palestinian civilians. The question that begs being asked in this case would be, “why would LF members commit these crimes, flaunting easily identifiable insignia and uniforms, incriminating themselves and their community, at a time when Lebanon’s Christians had been hard at work for reconciliation with other constitutive elements of Lebanese society?”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11161/pub_detail.asp

The nation’s largest, most sophisticated law enforcement agency, the New York City Police Department, announced its acquisition of new, high-tech equipment to help police officers keep the city safe from terrorists: the NYPD’s Harbor Unit now possesses six unmanned underwater drones to help bomb technicians and emergency services unit officers to detect suspected underwater explosives.

The NYPD now possesses six underwater drones, with each costing between $75,000 and $120,000 depending on the drones’ capabilities.

These drones help to sweep the city’s waterways and bridges searching for possible bombs and IEDs (improvised explosive devices). In a recent drone demonstration, NYPD officers easily tossed the lightweight — sixteen pound – submersible equipped with lights and sonar into the harbour and sailed it beneath the hull of a large commercial tanker docked close to the Kings County (Brooklyn) Army Terminal.

The police officers showed that they were able to guide the drone via remote control in order to utilize its underwater camera to search below the ship. The drone operators, all of whom are veteran detectives, have been trained to identify what biological or radiological weapons look like and where underwater explosives or narcotics are most likely to be hidden.

Under Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and later his replacement Ray Kelly, the Harbor Unit is used more in performing counterterrorism operations than the unit is used to conduct rescue and recovery operations.

On most days the unit receives several security alerts from the police department’s Intelligence Division each day. This situation demands that the unit inspects suspicious boats below bridges, sweep an incoming cargo ship’s hull, or respond to a report of a “suspicious floating package.”

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